Posted
by
Soulskill
on Thursday August 28, 2008 @07:04AM
from the upgrades dept.

Tim writes "English, German, Simplified Chinese, and Japanese versions of Internet Explorer 8 have been released for public beta. New features include accelerators, which provide instant context menu access for a number of common tasks; automatic crash recovery, which prevents a single page's failures from taking down your entire browser; and browser privacy, a feature that didn't make Firefox 3. I'm primarily a Firefox user, and I've been using IE8 at work (MS) for the past few weeks. It's a definite improvement over previous versions, and brings a lot to the table that Firefox requires extensions for. Give it a spin, submit feedback, and help keep all browser makers on their toes by facing each other's competition."

Yup, I'm wondering why the beta is available in german rather than a language with more speakers, such as spanish. Are they perhaps trying to win back the notoriously large amount of Firefox users in Germany?

I believe that German was chosen over Spanish for the betas because it's the second-most popular spoken language for programmers (at least, it used to be; I'm not too sure anymore). They cover the top two for debuggers out there, and then also include packages for Chinese and Japanese to test the character rendering and what-not.

Microsoft has long had a policy of translating into German and Japanese first. German words tend to be longer than other languages (except perhaps Dutch) so translation into German catches problems where text overflows the space allocated for it on the screen, and Japanese catches all the stupid character==byte assumptions that programmers make. I'm not sure why they don't do Arabic early as well to flush out left to right assumptions (also affecting Hebrew) and assumptions that characters have a one to one relationship with glyphs (also affecting Indian and South East Asian scripts).

According to the European and thier language report [europa.eu] German is the 2nd highest known language in the EU at 32% of the population speaking the language. Spanish is at 15% and is 5th.
For the top 5 it is:
English 51%
German 32%
French 26%
Italian 16%
Spanish 15%

It's about 1.1 times that actually, there's almost the same gap between Hindi and Spanish as there is
between native Spanish and English speakers. Mandarin on the other hand has almost as many speakers as those three combined.

Hindi is not the national language, it is a national language, one of several including English. And considering that around a third of India's population is illiterate, second languages are not as widely spoken as you would think.

But the bulk of that figure for Spanish is made up of people living in Latin America, where studies [ox.ac.uk] suggest only a relatively small percentage of the population uses the internet. Cuba [theinquirer.net] has only recently begun allowing PCs in private homes. Some countries in Latin America have less than 3% of the population using the internet; Germany has over 40% (Data refers to years 2004-06; Source [un.org]) Personal computer ownership per 100 is generally much lower than internet usage per 100 in Latin America, suggesting that th

Hey dude. If you're going to talk smack about a politician's lack of knowledge, you might try to spell "than" properly. You come off as an angry 14-year-old who hasn't the faintest clue what's going on.

How about a couple of facts?

1) GP's author is not a native English speaker.2) I don't see "than" or "then" anywhere in the GP.3) I have yet to see someone in this thread "talk smack" about any politician.

If you're going to burn karma, at least make it worth it. Perhaps, try replying to the correct post. Otherwise, you come off as an angry 14-year-old who hasn't the faintest clue what's going on.

Actually almost all Microsoft Beta code is available in the same languages at first - English, German, Japanese, and sometimes Simplified Chinese. The thing is that they are trying for coverage of the code to make sure localizations fit dialogs, etc. For example, of the languages that use an English like character set (what is it called, Roman or whatever), German tends to have the longest words / phrases. So by covering German they find out whether all of the localizations are going to fit in the space provided. In a similar way, by covering Japanese (and in this case Simplified Chinese) they are covering localizations in non-Roman character sets. Its really not about the number of users / speakers - its about the coverage of testing on the localizations and getting them to fit properly.

German is actually the second most communicated language, right after English. This directly translates to the fact that German is the second most common language on the internet. Granted, most of it is probably porn, but never the less it means more German speaking people would use IE8 than most other language speakers. Why is this? Because Germany has by far one of the strongest economies in the world (3rd behind the US and Japan) and thus can afford greater internet access. Actually, funny thing is

This has been questioned before. Their simple response was that German provided more unique wording situations that may or may not work in the UI.
So it's completely about testing coverage, not winback opportunities.

I'm wondering why the beta is available in german rather than a language with more speakers, such as spanish.

I have no inside knowledge of IE8, but I've worked on other localized products before. It's quite likely that the German translators were done, but the Spanish translators were still working on it. In other words, it may not have really been a conscious choice by MS to include German but not Spanish, just an artifact of the translators' schedules.

Opera is a good choice, and a fine browser. And it is still, hands-down best for testing standards compliance (in my humble opinion).

The only real fault they made at getting market share was waiting as long as they did before making it available for free. I don't pretend to know the finer-points of their business model, or Mozilla's for that matter, but people saw two browsers available gratis and one where you paid $35us (if i remember right...). If you could buy a Porsche or or have a VW, which would y

I assume yes. Call me naive, but I suspect MS know that they have more to lose by breaking web standards. Basically, they can't get away with that sh*t anymore - at least as far as the web goes. The average user is probably no wiser, but there are enough special interest groups to keep an eye on them in this area.

According to Ars Technica [arstechnica.com], sites with proper HTML information will display in standards mode, and sites without will not. There's a button at the bottom that allows you to switch between the two.
I have to say, I like IE8. It won't make me switch from Opera, but it's much speedier to use than IE7, and I'll probably find myself using it instead of Firefox whenever I come across a website that doesn't work in Opera. (Which is rare, and whenever that happens and I launch Firefox, it prompts me if I want to update, which gets annoying).

It passes the ACID 2 test on its default settings. I'm using it right now in fact (I like the IE RSS reader) and it actually renders Slashdot correctly. IE7 has been a disaster for the last few months on Slashdot. Not sure what changed but it didn't work at all.

Is it compliant with every single standard Firefox is? No. CSS Selectors I know is an area that still isn't up the standard. It is a lot closer than IE7 is though.

Nonsense. IE remains the majority browser. Developers who want to actually produce a product that works correctly for the majority of users target IE first (because Firefox usually does the right thing when dealing with IE-isms, and IE-isms are easier to undo to target Firefox than vice versa).

No, developers use Firefox to do their development. Why? Because of extensions like Web Developer [mozilla.org] and Firebug [mozilla.org] and YSlow [mozilla.org] and Selenium [mozilla.org] and Firecookie [mozilla.org] and FirePHP [mozilla.org] and Venkman [mozilla.org]. To name a few.

The fact that Firefox is also highly standards compliant is a bonus.

After you've used all these tools to get your application working properly, that's when you check it out in IE and see if there are any problems that need further attention.

As for the whole trustworthiness angle, well, call it FUD if you want. It's easy enough to submit code for independent critical review. When organizations don't choose to do so, the uncertainty and doubt that remains is real and intentionally created. Personally, I don't use MS products any more for anything outside of testing my web apps in IE, and have no intention of ever doing so again. I do not choose to trust them.

..that will definitely be craved by many Slashdot users, and not because of the gift shopping or use of public terminals.
Question is how long it will take before Firefox sees its market share diminish because of this feature, and, consequently, how long it will take Firefox to include it in an update.

Use Opera Portable [kejut.com]. It obliterates (erases AND overwrites) any and all signs of your activity when you exit. And it's had that feature for several years. Perfect for visiting internet cafes or libraries.

It obliterates (erases AND overwrites) any and all signs of your activity when you exit.

That implies both that you actually exit, and that you're actually running an unmodified version of Opera Portable. It also assumes that the host filesystem is actually overwriting the same blocks... and a few other things.

It also implies that you haven't already been pwned by something as simple as a keylogger.

So, better than nothing, but you've got to figure that whatever you do on a public terminal is public knowledge. Any attempt to prevent that is playing an arms race that you will lose.

I wouldn't count on this new feature to do much of anything... an article [foxnews.com]
from FoxNews says the following scary line:

Although casual users cannot see the previous user's search history, authorities such as the
police will be able to access it if necessary.

Kind of makes it seem like it's still stored somewhere, and while I don't know how the data is stored, I can't imagine it will take too long to figure out how to view the history of others.
Also interesting is that people at MS apparently nicknamed it 'Porn Mode'.

You say that like it is a bad thing. I prefer the use of extensions for my browser, instead of the bloatware that tends to happen. What if I don't care about privacy? I don't need that installed then. I like that I can choose the features I want, instead of having everything thrown in there.

Also, extensions have a great benefit with regards to updates. they can be updated at any time, and therefore don't have to wait on a new browser update for tweaking things and adding functionality. They also allow me to leave an extension that I don't want to update as is while still being able to update the browser (and possibly its security).

This is not to say that Firefox is not getting large, or that microsoft is not trying to assist people who don't have the savvy to look for extensions. I'm just saying extensions have a lot of benefits, and can be a very important tool.

What Firefox could do is add the most used extensions in by default. That way tech savy people can still do whatever they like, while people who do not know how to get extentions, still will be able to have the functionality.

Best of both worlds. And if bandwith download is an issue for you, then perhaps you should not download Firefox in the first place.

Interesting. Let's take a slightly deeper look, by looking at the most popular add-ons, and see if most non-savvy people would want them:

1.Ad-block plus - Users might like it, but people running the sites and companies would absolutely hate it. Get ready for a huge backlash on enabling this one in the base package.

2. DownloadHelper - Again, users may like it, but the people running the video sites would be fuming. As would people who do simple paid-for web tutorials, who would have everyone able to get their stuff extremely easily. Once again, good size backlash. This also has features that may need to be updated more frequently, such as when embedding code changes or something on the popular sites changes.

3. No-Script - I don't know if this would really help most non-savvy users, as they wouldn't understand why many more popular sites won't work that well, not to mention all the ajax-y things they'd miss.

4. Download-them-all - May be a good thing to implement (along with Download Status bar, a personal favorite). I'm not sure how many people would use its benefits though, but this one is a serious contender.

5. Flashgot (See Download Helper)

6. Firebug - No real use to non-savvy people.

7. Fast-video Download - See Download Helper

8. Cooliris - Cool, but no real functionality. Of course, Compiz, Widgets, Apples, etc all live off of cool, but I don't think this should be standard, especially since it is windows only.

9. IE Tab - Very nice for people who still stubbornly make IE specific sites, but still windows only.

So, of the top 10, only one could really have a good argument made for it being in the base package. I actually think Mozilla does a pretty good job finding the middle ground of stuff to keep in the base, and stuff to have as extensions, and that helps keep the energy where they think it should be, instead of focusing on little segments.

I might add that I like extensions also since they can add new functionality before a new version comes out.

And if bandwith download is an issue for you, then perhaps you should not download Firefox in the first place.

It's not that extensions are bad, it's just more of a hassle if the functionality is not included as standard.

It's one reason I can't be bothered to try switching from Opera. Sure, I've downloaded Firefox, but I don't have to time to try to hunt down all the extensions to replicate Opera's standard functionality, and wonder if each extension is the one I want.

This is even more of an issue if you are trying to persuade a random non-geek user to switch from IE - you can't say "Go to this link", instead you have to say "Go here, then install it, then go here, here and here, and install all those things". For now, Firefox has done well because its standard features are still better than IE (and the extra standard features of Opera do not seem to be known by as many people). But you can't expect an average user to grapple with trying to hunt down extensions, just to replicate what'll be standard behaviour in IE.

As for bloatware, you need to compare real world filesizes. Last time I checked, Opera was still smaller than Firefox (even without any extensions), though I haven't checked the current sizes.

It *is* a bad thing. Usually built in features work - extensions in my experience, often don't and can easily be incompatible with each other.

I've only got a handful of extensions (5) installed and Firefox 3 crashes about 12 times a week according to the logs. According to the same logs, IE has only crashed twice EVER since I built the machine 6 months ago and I use it almost as often (I'm a web developer).

I think it's the extension-heavy approach which makes Firefox the least stable piece of software I've ever used. I doubt it crashes if you don't install any extensions. More basic features should be built in in my opinion - so you don't need to install an extension to get an extremely rudimentary feature like a close button on each tab.

Out of curiosity, what extensions are you using? I have around 7 or 8 depending on computer, and I've had no crashes. As always, people's problems vary, but I'm curious as to what may be crashing you.

As for the most popular extensions, such as downloadhelper, firebug, etc, those tend to be pretty darn reliable, which may be due to many bug reports, the open source concept of helping out with fixes, or because people tend to use things that work, but I have had very few problems.

On the other hand, I've had VERY bad luck with active-X "extensions" in IE, and even when not allowing ActiveX, I crash more with IE.

On another note, is it the sites you are working on that tend to crash, or basic browsing? Maybe IE is more forgiving of code you are still working on and may have forgotten a curly brace or two?

Yeah, but the user has to turn it on.... Press the button, enter "InPrivateBrowsing" and your privacy is protected.... Kind of silly. Shouldn't such a feature be activated in the first place? And then, when the application requires the long-term cookies or you want a history, you turn off certain parts of it?

Considering a lot of people will just be wanting to browse at work or whatever and be able to easily find things in the history, I don't see why it should be on by default. Isn't 'browser privacy' basically just a way of hiding your pr0n-browsing history?

Once the setting is chosen, others using the same computer will not be able to see which sites have been accessed. Other browsers have similar functions, but this one is far more prominent. Although casual users cannot see the previous user's search history, authorities such as the police will be able to access it if necessary.

So basically the data still exists, just people who nothing will not be able to see it, I knew we were wrong in all those security model that try and keep the experts out. It's really Joe "average" Blogs we should have been protecting against all this time.. DOH!!!

It's a definite improvement over previous versions, and brings a lot to the table that Firefox requires extensions for.

That may be true. But given the speed that developments and innovations get put into FF and the general convenience of the plugin system I think I'll stage with the Fox. If there is anything amazingly good and useful you can be sure we'll all have it very soon indeed.

New versions of IE is a Good Thing... Competition is good with something like browsers.

For the average Joe having features which normally require extensions just be there is probably a good thing. Perhaps Firefox should have the option to enabling a set of officially sanctioned extensions while installing? Bloating is not the solution, but checking the "enable feature X" checkbox beats searching for the actually good ones...

Private browsing is a two-sided thing. It's a good feature, but sort of pointless if you actually want to store bookmarks of things like your favorite naughty sites... I run two Firefox profiles personally. Unfortunately it's a bit difficult to set up, but I get the best of both worlds.

Sounds like a great feature, I can't try IE8 since I'm on Linux, but from the descriptions I've read of it, it seems like they're doing something right this time instead of just jacking up the release number.

I can't believe I'm actually sitting here hoping that Firefox will copy a feature from IE. Good game, Microsoft.

What I'm really curious to see, and I can only assume it will be there, is if they also include the ability to LOCK-OUT the InPrivate feature. Many corporate (and especially government) IT/legal departments excplicitly WANT your browsing to be tracked. Sure I can go in and delete stuff manually (except when I am not given permissions to access that folder... which I'm not) but right now all of our standard desktop configurations prevent you from clicking the "clear private data" button.

So not only are the advertisers (as I've read elsewhere) possibly not going to like this feature, but many corp/gov types won't install it until/unless they can excplicitly prevent its use.

Any IT department that *really* wants your browsing history is going to route any traffic on port 80 through a proxy, so they can get reports on what you've been doing from one central location, instead of having to trawl through every user's history. The InPrivate feature isn't going to stop that being possible, so IT departments are fine.

I use FF for basic browsing (without many extensions) and I mostly think it's great. Rarely crashes, renders most sites fine, etc.

But I really, really don't like the apparently single-threadedness. Each tab should be its own thread, IMO, so that when one tab is busy with some random java applet, the others are still getting enough CPU slices to actually be usable.

Another time you get this behavior is when you open multiple tabs one right after the other. The tab you are viewing slows to a crawl while content is loaded in the other tabs.

I'm not saying this is better in Opera/IE/Safari/Lynx, but I'd really like to see this fixed.

Now if they would only give us some way of running multiple versions of IE side by side. There are still a lot of people using IE6, so I need to test sites against that. But I can't if I upgrade to IE7. And if I upgrade to IE8, I can't test against IE7 or IE6. We need a standalone version of IE6 for web developers to use for website testing. The time limited VM that they provide is a start, but I don't want to boot up an entire VM of Windows just to test one page.

Your last Firefox session closed unexpectedly. YOu can restore the tabs and windows from your previous sessions, or start a new session if you think the problem was related to a page you were viewing.

Ahh, you haven't actually seen IE8's automatic crash recovery feature then. Each of the tabs are isolated from each other, so if one tab crashes it doesn't take down the whole browser. The tab just goes away and then pops back up with a message saying IE recovered the tab. It's definitely not the same thing as "Restore Previous Session."

Here's a blog post [msdn.com] from the IE team that describes how the feature works, if you're interested in more. Basically, it creates a couple different processes, which are all separate from the main UI frame. This means one process can crash, bringing down all the tabs in that process, but the rest are unaffected.

I agree, I think it's a pretty exciting feature. It almost makes crashing your browser an enjoyable experience. (I managed to crash a tab when I installed the Adobe SVG plugin to see if I could get another point or two on the Acid3 test).

One negative side effect of this is that there is some overhead in creating new processes. This will probably lead to Slashdot complaining about how much memory IE uses and how bloated it is, but personally, I find the reliability gains worth it. Another positive side effect though is that it isolates the Javascript interpreters from each other, which keeps one misbehaving page from locking up the whole browser.

When I first went to the download page it looked terrible. I thought they had written an IE only page! Then I fired up Opera and it looked fine.Did a refresh on Firefox and it was fine!I hate it when Microsoft doesn't give me a reason to crab about them!Wait I just went to grab silverlight! Cool they don't support FF3 those bastards!!!!Anyway it is worth trying out just to see how well it works.

Lots of linux users would like to have IE, because we need to test websites in it. I have the wine versions of IE6 and IE7, but they're extremely slow and mostly broken, so a version from Microsoft would be great. And if it turned out to be the better browser, of course, I'd use it regularly.

You want MS to provide a linux version so that you can either state your intent to never install it, or so that you can sh*t on it? I'm sure they'll get right on that...

That's short sighted.

I would try IE8 if it ran on my platform of choice, which happens to be Kubuntu. If IE won't run on it, I won't try it. IE8 might be the best browser since Amaya, but if it won't run on my system, I won't try it.

Not all Linux users hate Microsoft or are FOSS zealots. Most of us just love Linux. We are open to trying MS products, and when MS creates a better product than Linux||Firefox then we will use it. I only wish that MS Office 2007 would run on Linux, I would pay for it and use it in a heartbeat. But I am not about to use MS's bloated, insecure operating system to get it.

Like hell. There's a very common saying, and it's pretty damn true: "BSD users use BSD because they love Unix. Linux users use Linux because they hate Windows."

Go look at Ubuntu Forums or Linux Questions or any of the other community sites; it's a huge whack of Microsoft hate (often leading them to convince themselves that what they're using is better than it actually is, but hey, that's part of the open-source gig these days).

Which is the best part of BSD. I love unix and I love windows. Nobody cares if I submit new freebsd ports and happen to use a text editor in windows to create the Makefile and Outlook to mail the attachment to the port maintainers:-)

Don't Firefox, Mozilla, Epiphany, and Galeon all use the Gecko rendering engine? What's the point if they all render the exact same? I understand that as a web developer, it would be useful to test on Opera, Safari, IE and Firefox, but not on the same rendering engine

You don't have to go back if you don't want to, but there are many people still using IE, and it would be easier to write websites if every single bit of JS or CSS didn't have to have a workaround for it. If IE8 brings us one step closer to that dream, then I welcome it with open arms! Even if I'm not ever going to use it.

So not like Firefox 2 then, which has upgraded itself no less than 16 times on my PC here ?
Firefox pushes out beta stuff too, then try to cover it with automatic patches. But they're OSS, so that makes it okay...

Msie, apparently, has a firefox like drop-down box of search engines, and wikipedia, etc. But the msie drop-down menu does not include google. Ouuu what a burn! Also, if you highlight a street address, msie will take you to msft maps, not google maps.

Just one more reason to use firefox instead of msie. BTW: according to the same article, firefox installed base is up 6% to 19% while msie fell 6% to 73% of the installed base, or something like that.